Monitoring what they say (and don’t)

Andrew Hammond, who speaks wickedly good Arabic and is a close friend of Abu Muqawama’s violent Pashtun flatmate, has an article up on the Reuters wire on the thaw in relations between Saudi Arabia and Qatar.* This is bad news for consumers of the Arabic-language media, because Qatar-owned al-Jazeera was one of the few places where you could read or see anything critical of the Saudi regime. Rich Saudi princes have bought controlling interests in pretty much every newspaper (al-Hayat, ash-Sharq al-Awsat, an-Nahar, etc.) and television station (al-Arabiyya, LBC, etc.) in the Arab world. So a country that sends hundreds of suicide bombers to Iraq to kill "Shia apostate dogs" (read = innocent civilians), provided 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers and spreads the most extreme interpretation of Islam through the Islamic world never has anything bad written or said about it in the Arabic-language media. Great. *Abu Muqawama has never actually seen his flatmate do anything violent, but he is Pashtun and asks Abu Muqawama to post entries describing him as "violent" every so often in order to boost his "street cred" with the Islamist militants among whom he spends his days drinking tea.